Short On Time, Long On Feeling:
Study Suggests Deadlines Intensify Emotions

By Inga Kiderra

Amateur observers
and scholars alike have remarked that older people often have
more intense and complex emotional lives than their younger
cohort. What accounts for the difference, wondered psychologist
Ursina Teuscher: Wisdom gained with the gathering years? A shift
in values thanks to greater life experience? Or, is it a keener
sense of time – a precious and, of necessity, diminishing
resource?

To test the notion
that time limits and approaching endings add fuel to feelings,
Teuscher, a post-doctoral researcher in the cognitive science
department of the University of California, San Diego, asked
165 young subjects to imagine themselves in several different
scenarios.

Half of the scenarios
included an explicit “limited-future” condition,
such as the last day of a holiday. The other half differed only
in that they made no mention of the future at all. The subjects,
whose mean age was 20.68 years, were asked to read the scenarios
and then indicate how intensely (on a scale of 1 to 5) they
would experience 31 different emotions.

“Given time limits,
people showed more extreme emotions – on both the positive
and negative ends of the scale,” Teuscher said. “The
test results suggest that a different time perspective itself
can cause differences in emotional complexity and intensity.”

In one experimental scenario, for example, half the participants
were asked to picture an evening spent at a close colleague’s
home. The colleague is a very bad cook and burns the dinner.
A dessert made and brought by the participant is not much better:
It’s dry and not at all what was planned. Nonetheless,
the two have “a cheerful evening and chat until late into
the night.” The other half of the participants considered
the same story in light of additional information that they
would be retiring next week and moving to another city. Compared
to the open-ended group, the time-limited subjects reported
for this scenario that they would feel more closeness, more
patience, more respect, more sadness and less irritation.

The findings, presented
at the American Psychological Society annual convention in Los
Angeles, May 26-29, may have broad implications, Teuscher said,
“in the study of how people cope with endings and transitions,
not only death but also separations, migration, job changes
or retirement – in short, any critical life event requiring
people to deal with the foreseeable end of a situation.”

Teuscher is also conducting
research to see how a time-limited perspective affects decisions:
Do people choose something different if they think they’re
choosing for the last time?

In an experiment involving
book and movie selections, young subjects faced with a hypothetical
limit on the future tended to go for familiar materials over
reading or seeing something new. In other words, they made choices
similar to those made by older individuals (as observed by other
researchers).

“The salience
of an approaching ending is a potentially powerful variable
that has so far received little attention,” Teuscher said.
“It would be worthy of further investigation both in the
fields of life-span development and decision-making.”